boozehoundbrew
Member
I made my own wort chiller a few years ago. It is a double-coil (one smaller cylinder within a larger one, with a few inches in between), made of 90 feet of 3/8" copper tubing. [Shown on its side in the picture below]
[/url] Homemade by clitesbr, on Flickr[/IMG]
I designed it to fit my old 5 gallon kettle, which was tall and skinny, and it worked perfectly for that. But I just upgraded to two 15 gallon kettles, and they're about 8" WIDER in diameter, so there's lots of extra room on all sides of my wort. Even when the new kettles have 5 gallons inside, they're so big that about a third of my wort chiller is just sticking out above the top of the liquid. As a result, its taking me 15 minutes (instead of just 5, with former setup) to cool 5 gallons of wort from 212 to 65.
So, my question:
Is it possible to re-mold my copper tubing into a new wort chiller? And, if so, how do I go about that?
- Should I try to uncoil all the copper all the way, then start from scratch?
- Or, would it be better to slowly work each set of coils wider and wider until they reach the diameter that I want?
Also, I'd love suggestions about whether to keep the double-coil design, or if you think I should just switch to a standard shaped immersion chiller.
Thanks, in advance, for your help.
I designed it to fit my old 5 gallon kettle, which was tall and skinny, and it worked perfectly for that. But I just upgraded to two 15 gallon kettles, and they're about 8" WIDER in diameter, so there's lots of extra room on all sides of my wort. Even when the new kettles have 5 gallons inside, they're so big that about a third of my wort chiller is just sticking out above the top of the liquid. As a result, its taking me 15 minutes (instead of just 5, with former setup) to cool 5 gallons of wort from 212 to 65.
So, my question:
Is it possible to re-mold my copper tubing into a new wort chiller? And, if so, how do I go about that?
- Should I try to uncoil all the copper all the way, then start from scratch?
- Or, would it be better to slowly work each set of coils wider and wider until they reach the diameter that I want?
Also, I'd love suggestions about whether to keep the double-coil design, or if you think I should just switch to a standard shaped immersion chiller.
Thanks, in advance, for your help.